Unofficial news and tips about Google

January 11, 2011

Google Chrome to Drop Support for H.264

Chromium's blog informs that Google Chrome will drop support for H.264 in the coming months and will only support WebM (VP8) and Theora codecs.

We expect even more rapid innovation in the web media platform in the coming year and are focusing our investments in those technologies that are developed and licensed based on open web principles. To that end, we are changing Chrome's HTML5 <video> support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.

Google decided to pick sides, much like Mozilla and Opera, in an effort to encourage developers to use WebM. Right now, the only important website that uses WebM is YouTube, Google's video sharing service. Internet Explorer, Safari and iOS devices are unlikely to support WebM, while hardware acceleration and Flash support are expected later this year.

John Gruber thinks that "this is just going to push publishers toward forcing Chrome users to use Flash for video playback — and that the video that gets sent to Flash Player will be encoded as H.264". He also finds it ironic that Google Chrome bundles Adobe's proprietary Flash plugin, which is a great software for playing H.264 videos.

VP8 has a long way to go before becoming the codec of choice for Web videos and Google decided to make it more popular by dropping support for the competing codec from its browser. Last year, Andy Rubin said that sometimes being open "means not being militant about the things consumer are actually enjoying," but that's not the case here.

Firefox doesn't support H.264, either. It can't, and never will by default, because H.264 is a licensed codec. This is a smart move by Google, as it would put pressure on Apple and Microsoft to support more than just H.264 in their browsers. WebM and Theora are better and open codecs, and we should all be supporting them. Fuck H.264 and MPEG-LA licensing BS.

Even when IE9 is released and becomes equivalent to what IE8 is currently, including current trends, WebM/Ogg-supporting browsers will have a slight lead on those with H.264 support.

So now is abolutely the time to be militant - it's a pivotal point in the development of what will become the world's media respoitory.

Either we encode it all in a format MPEG-LA has licencing rules on and end up with the problems when we want to find new ways to use our media, not dissimilar to the problems we've had with the past three versions of IE; or we choose to adopt open standards with no legal restrictions and have an interoperable web in years to come.

This is the kind of ballsy move we need to see more of if there's any chance of Apple and Microsoft being pulled over (albeit somewhat against their will) to a web that's in everyone's common interest, not one that exists to serve their respective corporate agendas.

We really messed up the last iteration of the web by basing so much of it on proprietary crap like Flash. Letting the next iteration go up around a patent-protected video codec with royalty payments attached would be a far worse mistake.

Sure, Flash uses that codec anyway, but Flash (like IE) is yesterday's news, an old dog who can still lift its head and snarl, but doesn't have any teeth left to bite. Apple's proprietary play for the web is *today's* threat, and we should take it very, very seriously -- H.264 is a small but important part of that.

So, is google also dropping Flash and mp3 support? Those are not open, either.

Google, get some balls! (like twitter!)At least Apple has the decency to say: 'we don't like Flash, we're not using it'. Just go ahead and say: 'we don't like Apple, we're fighting 'em'. Don't pretend you 'want to be open'. Either be fully open, or don't lie to us. Whatever happened to the 'don't be evil?' :(

@suresh writes "WebM(VP8) is sitting on a huge patent liability -- this situation is far WORSE for WebM than H.264."

The closest I can find is that the MPEG LA group (the ones who extort the patent licensing fees for H.264) are fishing around trying to see if they can find anyone with patents they can assert against VP8, too (looks more like a FUD attempt than anything else): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebM#Licensing

@suresh is right, with heavyweights behind H.264, and major software for video editing support it (and not WebM), that momentum will be virtually impossible to break.So this is just creating chaos, as I see little chance that this move will "force" anyone to start taking WebM seriously.Also right about Patent liability behind WebM - as detailed analysis of WebM open source code showed, it is violating bunch of things there, sadly.

"It could be that Google?s plan is to tip the hand of MPEG LA and force this issue into the courts as quickly as possible."

I think this is a key move a very interesting game of chess. H264 hardware support is the biggest obstacle to WebM adoption.

Idealogically, WebM has it licked but on a practical level, H264 is too convenient and mobile devices will not be able to upgrade their hardware to support hardware decoding of WebM.

I would expect as a result of this battle, the unconditional opening and unrestricted licensing of H264 (for web & open source use) to come sometime in the next year. That would be the best possible outcome for everyone (including Google which is only fighting this fight for that reason I believe).

Geet: good observation. It is true that if H.264 were free, there would be no technical reason to oppose it.

I expect, though, that Apple and Microsoft will be too desperate to make it truly free -- H.264 is their hedge, to ensure that people are forced to keep giving them some money even if/when their Internet/mobile strategies fail.

They'll probably open it up a bit more, so that individuals and companies too small to sue anyway can use it without worrying, but they'll make sure that they have some way to fleece big companies and keep a revenue stream open.